corporation

Ezra Klein’s work at the Washington Post is indispensable; he brings much insight to the task of making domestic policy accessible to those of us who only follow it part time. But I’m not buying this one:

There’s a tendency among some on the left and, with the “libertarian populists,” some on the right, to portray the interests of corporate American and the interests of low-income Americans as directly opposed to each other. That’s not true. They can conflict, of course — it’s easy enough to imagine a proposal to raise taxes on corporations in order to fund a low-income tax cut — but they’re not always in tension. Sometimes they’re even in concert.

Two similar pieces are getting a lot of play this week: James Whittaker’s blog post about why he left Google and Greg Smith’s op-ed about why he left Goldman Sachs. Both
talk of their high level of company loyalty and enthusiasm in the past.
Both bemoan the changes in their respective corporate cultures that led
them to leave. Neither seems all that hopeful about his company’s
future.

What neither of them does, however, is demonstrate that
the problem is that Google/Goldman Sachs used to care about more than
just making money but doesn’t anymore.